Agematsu, Nagano

The scent of Kiso hinoki — that particular cedar-cypress, resinous and cool — still clings to Agematsu. The town sits in a gorge carved by the Kiso River, with the steep ridges of the Kiso mountain range pressing in from the east and the gentler Atera hills rolling to the west. Agematsu-juku was the thirty-eighth post station on the Nakasendo, and the old street alignment survives, quiet on weekdays, its proportions still scaled to foot traffic rather than cars.

The forest is the town's long memory. During the Edo period, the Owari domain imposed strict timber controls here — the留山 and 留木 systems that regulated Kiso's prized trees — and the legacy runs through everything: the lumber trade, the local sake called Nakanorisan, the noodles at Koshiya inn known as jumyo soba. Akasawa Natural Recreation Forest, reached by a narrow valley road, holds stands of naturally grown hinoki centuries old, and a forest railway once used to haul timber now carries visitors through the canopy. The Forest Railway Memorial Museum holds the remaining locomotives and rolling stock, their scale surprisingly intimate.

At Nezame-no-Toko, the Kiso River has cut through granite into a sequence of pale, smooth basins — one of the Kiso Hakkei, the eight noted views of the valley. Rinsenji temple looks down on it from the slope above. Ono-no-taki, a direct-fall waterfall that appeared in Edo-period woodblock prints, lies just off the national highway. These are not set-piece attractions so much as features of a landscape that has been looked at, named, and painted for a very long time.